I’m surprised that I merely liked this book. Divided reviews seemed to suggest that I’d either dislike it or adore it, and while I wavered in both directions at different points in the book, I came down calmly on a satisfied ‘that was okay’… and it was.

Smilla Jasperson has an affinity for ice and snow, and when her friend, twelve-year old Isaiah is found dead, leaving only footprints in the snow on the roof above, she realises that she cannot ignore the signs that something other than an accident has occurred.

Smilla is one of the more interesting protagonist characters that I’ve read, and I enjoyed her determination and her interaction with the people around her. The crime investigation itself is well-paced if a little over-burdened with characters, and it unfolded very nicely. It tested the ‘oh, come on’ boundaries a bit, in terms of motive, but I liked it nonetheless.

Apropos of nothing, this book contains the most incongruous sex-related paragraph ever included in a work of crime or mystery fiction (or fan-fiction for that matter), even for one with a bias towards the sensual –cold, warmth, taste, burgeoning love, okay; in the midst of this, a single pornographic aside that threw me out of the story while I tried to imagine the manoeuvring necessary to achieve it. I would dearly love to quote it, but I think it is better left for the reader to find. ( )

Sehr spannender Schrott wie ich finde.: Es scheint ja die unterschiedlichsten Motivationen zu geben ein Buch zu lesen. Die einen wollen den Film lesen, den sie gerade gesehen haben. Die anderen wollen dem Schriftsteller erklären, was der geneigte Leser lesen möchte. Die dümmsten Vertreter (oder Einzelhandelskaufleute?) jedoch bezeichnen sich als Literaturinteressierte und glauben, dass sie damit ihre Umwelt mit Tipps belästigen dürfen.
Fräulein Smilla ist wie andere Romane von Hoeg bestimmt nicht leicht lesbare Kost. Der Stil ist gewöhnungsbedürftig, manchmal schlicht (könnte das einen Bezug zum Inhalt haben?), nie effektheischend und letztlich aber immer passend zu dem, was erzählt wird. Welche Zeitform dabei verwendet wird, mag ja nun Nebensache sein, auch wenn wir in der Schule gelernt haben "Erzählzeit=Präteritum". Manchmal macht ja genau das den Reiz aus: dass nicht alles so ist, wie wir es erwarten. Und dieser Effekt gehört zu einem Kriminalroman wie Schweigen zu einem Dummkopf.
Achja, Kriminalroman. Smilla ist bestimmt keiner der reinen Sorte. Ein Reiseführer für Grönland ist es aber gewiss auch nicht. Die zahlreichen Schilderungen nehmen den offenen Leser gefangen und ebenso wie die Eindrücke, die man von der außerordentlich starken Hauptfigur bekommt, lassen sie einen so schnell nicht los. Die Bezüge, die Hoeg setzt, strengen an, jedenfalls denjenigen, der sich darauf einlässt.
Fazit: wer es nicht kaufen möchte, braucht es nicht. Es gibt Bibliotheken und Büchereien. Man kann es anlesen und dann entscheiden. Man kann es auch mit dem "Plan zur Abschaffung der Dunkelheit" von Hoeg probieren.
Wer mit dem Buch, nicht zurecht kommt, muss nicht das Buch dafür verantwortlich machen, geschweige denn den Schriftsteller, denn "wenn ein Buch und ein Kopf zusammen stoßen, und es klingt hohl - liegt das dann am Buch?"
Reinlesen....;)

I disliked this book. I thought the writer was aiming for a movie deal, and the characters and events were predictable and dull. Way too much time spent describing her outfits. ( )

This book was very poetically written, and a lot of the language was plain old gorgeous. I liked Smilla, by and large, and I especially enjoyed how the mechanic had the same first name as the author. (There was another mor minor character named Mr. Hoeg as well.)However, I had a lot of trouble with this book. Starting about halfway through I began having a really hard time following the plot. I don't know if I was just too distracted to catch on or what, but in the end I still wasn't entirely clear what was going on or why anybody was doing anything. What's more, I still don't really get what happened to Isaiah or what the deal with the meteor was. Maybe the author was trying to leave things open for a sequel, I don't know. Anyway, the writing was refreshing and I'm glad I read it, even if I did lose track of the plot along the way. ( )

I had heard alot of hype about this quirky, well-written mystery - unfortunately for me, it did not live up to the hype. It is mostly set in Copenhagen, with the latter portions revolving around an icy boat trip to a glacier. Smilla, our ballsy female protagonist, is a half-Inuit odd-ball of a woman, whose only passion appears to be the math and science behind ice and snow. One night she just happens to arrive on scene of what appears to be an accident where her 6 yr old neighbor has fallen from a roof to his death; she then involves herself in proving he was murdered.

It sounds interesting, but I just found most of it fairly dull. Alot of skipping around vaguely between pseudoscience, Smilla's childhood in Greenland, and lots of characters that seemed to blend together. Smilla was so odd as to be unrealistic - to me it was clear that a male was trying to write from a female character's perspective; it was somehow off. I really disliked the jarring present tense narration -- this just feels gimmicky to me and is very distracting. This was one of those books that you get stuck often reading the same sentence over and over again. Some of the prose regarding the ice and the science behind it, especially when they arrived on the glacier was really empiricly quite good though, and the cold forboding atmosphere on the ship was well-done. But in the end, the 'big reveals' seemed well, almost comical to me -- rather ridiculous - and not worth wading through the other #400 pages of the novel.

I can see why some people would like this - the author is clearly talented and intelligent, and maybe one could think of Smilla as edgy and the writing "hip," but to me it was not a well-crafted mystery as it was NOT a page-turner. It felt very contrived and I hate to say it but, pretentious as well. A generous 3 stars. ( )